Ian Ayres - corporate, antitrust law expert - joins law faculty

STANFORD - Ian Ayres, 32, a lawyer and economist specializing in corporate
law, has joined the Stanford Law School faculty as a full professor.

His appointment to the tenured post, which took effect Jan. 1, was
formally reported to the Stanford University Board of Trustees on Feb. 11.

Ayres previously held a joint appointment as an associate professor at
Northwestern University Law School and as a research fellow with the American
Bar Foundation, both of Chicago.

He spent the 1991 fall term at Yale University as a visiting professor of
law.

"Prof. Ayres is widely recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of
his generation in the fields of law and economics and corporate law," said
Paul Brest, dean of Stanford Law School.

"His work is unusually broad in scope, ranging from such areas as accident
law and the economics of contracts to consumer law and discrimination on the
basis of race and sex," the dean said.

Ayres, who is considered a rising star in the field of corporate law,
received a J.D. in 1986 from Yale, where he was articles editor of the Yale
Law Journal.

Ayres did his undergraduate work at Yale, where he majored in both
economics and Russian and East European Studies.

A top student, he was elected in his junior year to Phi Beta Kappa, the
national academic honor society, and received his B.A. in 1981 with highest
honors.

In the five years since graduating from law school, Ayres has not only
earned a 1988 doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, but also passed the Illinois Bar exam, clerked on the 10th
Circuit Court of Appeals, spent a summer as scholar-in-residence at a law
firm (Chicago's Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal), written 23 academic articles,
co- authored a book for the Oxford University Press, served as associate
editor of the journal Law and Social Inquiry, conducted an empirical research
study with the American Bar Foundation, and engaged in various pro bono
activities.

During the 1990-91 academic year he was both a visiting professor at the
University of Virginia and a guest scholar of the Brookings Institution.

Ayres made news last spring when the Harvard Law Review (104:817)
published his article "Fair Driving: Race and Gender Discrimination in Retail
Car Negotiations."

Based on Ayres' American Bar Foundation research study, the article showed
that the proffered price of an automobile can vary significantly depending on
the race and sex of the shopper. Car dealers (at least in the study area of
Chicago) offered the highest prices to black males and black females, and the
lowest to white males, even though all buyer-testers followed an identically
scripted bargaining strategy.

Other articles by Ayres explore issues where economics and law intersect.
In a 1989 Yale Law Journal piece (99:87), "Filling Gaps in Incomplete
Contracts," Ayres and co-author Robert Gertner deal with the problem of how
courts should interpret and enforce contracts that have incomplete or open
terms.

Ayres also has written about antitrust policy and the increasingly subtle
forms of collusion by which industries may defeat the purpose of antitrust
laws.

His book for the Oxford University Press, which he wrote with John
Braithwaite, suggests innovative methods for delegating regulatory authority
to private parties. Called Responsive Regulation: Transcending the
Deregulation Debate, it is scheduled for release early in 1992.

Much of Ayres' work exhibits a concern for the less- privileged members of
society. The automobile shopping study is one example. Another is a paper for
the Northwestern Law Review on retail markup disclosure. A third involves the
price and availability of insurance, with Ayres serving as an economic expert
to the attorneys general of 18 states for the case, In re Insurance Antitrust
Litigation, C88-1688 (N.D.Cal.).

He has been continuously involved in unpaid public service work, such as
the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project and the New Haven Battered
Women's Temporary Restraining Order Project. Last year, he succeeded in
convincing a judge to vacate a death sentence in an Illinois case where he
had been counsel.

In a lighter vein, Ayres is remembered at Yale as much for his singing as
his scholarship. He was a soloist with the Yale Russian Chorus and with the
famed Whiffenpoofs.

Also a marathon runner (Boston 1984, in 3 hours, 12 minutes), he placed
first in the 1989 5-kilometer run of the Law and Society Association.

-ch-

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